Jan. 30, 2006

ATHENS, Ohio - Outside of Al Hadithah, Iraq, on May 27, 2005, the Humvee that Eric Bildstein was riding in hit an IED, an improvised explosive device placed by insurgents. A shock wave instantaneously deafened his ear drums, knocked his gunner unconscious and paralyzed his driver with fear but the only thing racing through Bildstein's mind once the smoke cleared was, "Get out of the kill zone!"

"What they teach you is that once you get hit, you've got to react and move," said Bildstein about his Marine training. "There's a kill zone that they want to catch you in and ambush you in while you're stunned so I told the driver to punch it and get out of there. After we pulled out of the area, I remember just sitting there saying, `Wow!' because I didn't even see it coming."

Two days later, Bildstein's up-armored Humvee was last in a line of four vehicles out on patrol of a highway next to the Euphrates River. Even though his driver was following the path of the other three vehicles, a slight unevenness in the road caused the back of his Humvee to slam down on the road, triggering a landmine that had been placed and then paved over with concrete.

"We hit this landmine and went airborne," Bildstein said. "When the smoke cleared from my face a little, all I could see was pavement so we must have hit nose-first and then tumbled and slid for a while. An anti-tank landmine is meant to take out a 60-70 ton tank and we were in a five-ton Humvee so the magnitude of the force completely blasted off a quarter of our vehicle. Everybody lived but we were not real happy at the time."

A 6-foot-9-inch body like Bildstein's is not exactly the size Humvees were designed for so while crammed into the interior during the explosion, he could do nothing as two 30-pound radios became dislodged and slammed into his left side, one causing a two-inch chunk of cartilage to tear off his knee. His leg was nothing, though, compared to the pain he felt in his back.

"I think the landmine may have compressed my spine a little bit," he said. "It was kind of scary because there would be days where I couldn't walk. They woke me up one day for a quick-reaction-force mission to help out Lima Company in Al Hadithah because they were taking fire but I couldn't stand up."

Bildstein's injuries allowed him to travel to other parts of Iraq for treatment. He visited Baghdad and Al Fallujah but neither compared to the violence in the western province of Al Anbar, where his battalion patrolled from the town of Hit - just northwest of Ar Ramadi, which is 100 miles due west of Baghdad - all the way along the Euphrates River to Al Qaim near the Syrian border (map of Iraq).

A thrower on the Ohio University track and field team, Bildstein spent what would have been his senior season serving in Iraq. He had signed on with the Marines during the summer of 2000 shortly after graduating from North Olmsted High School on the west side of Cleveland.

While majoring in chemistry at Ohio, he spent one weekend a month and his entire summer and winter breaks doing Marine training, such as infantry school during the summer of 2001. In June of 2004 - just a few weeks after his fifth-place finish in the javelin at the Mid-American Conference Track and Field Championships - he got word that his unit would be called up for duty in the Iraq war.

On January 4, 2005, Bildstein reported to the 3rd battalion, 25th Marines unit out of Akron and six days later his weapons company went to California for final training and preparations before heading to the Middle East.

"When we were training in California, our living conditions were very poor," he said. "We were literally outside for two months but when we got to Kuwait, we had these tents, a great chow hall and bottled water everywhere. The first time it really hit me that I was in another country was when I picked up a bottle of water and the writing was all in Arabic."

After spending a few days in Kuwait while the rest of the battalion was assembled, Bildstein entered Iraq on March 3 and went on his first mission five days later. His platoon was based at the Al Hadithah dam and he spent the first two months there as a gunner, which entailed sitting in the fourth vehicle and covering the rear of the platoon.

"When things first start happening, you want to automatically look that way and go to the fight," Bildstein said about his role, "but I had to cover what everybody else was not looking at because they like to hit you from two sides. What stunk was riding backwards for two months because if you look through night-vision goggles while driving backwards, it messes with your head."

While on patrol, it was Bildstein's job to spot IEDs and anything that looked suspicious.

"You have to memorize the roads and where every little mound or hole is," he said. "You have to remember every piece of dirt or rock and know every bump and crack in the road. You're looking for shiny things, which are hard to see in those goggles, but if you saw something different, nine out of 10 times it was a bomb. Our platoon alone found 16 or 17 bombs and seven or eight mines and we were just one of nine platoons out there rolling around in our region."

At the end of April, Bildstein was promoted to assistant patrol leader, meaning he was second in command of the platoon.

"It meant doing miniscule things like making sure everybody's weapon was clean to telling people where to go when the stuff went down," said Bildstein. "It was a pretty broad responsibility but it was kind of nice having guys look up to me."

When Bildstein's platoon was around its base at the Al Hadithah dam - a structure nine miles long creating a lake off the Euphrates River - he slept in a dorm-sized bunker with four other Marines. About 80 percent of the time, though, they were out in the field and he had to sleep either on the ground or on the hood of one of their Humvees.

"If you were small enough, you could sleep in your seat (in the Humvee) but it didn't matter because you were so freakin' tired that you would have slept on a bed of spikes," Bildstein said. "During June, July and August, the heat index was 150-155 degrees so it didn't cool off until about three or four in the morning. Then the sun came up at 6:30 so you had a whole hour and a half of cool 95-degree weather and that felt great to us.

"There were nights where I just passed out on the ground and woke up with my face in the dirt. It didn't matter, though. After not showering and not acting like a human being for a while, you don't care anymore. You eat when you eat, you drink when you drink and you sleep when you sleep. You just worry about each other and that's about it."

When fatigue did not immediately consume him during his downtime, Bildstein would lay at night thinking about his teammates and coaches back in Athens. For a while, he tried to throw 30 to 40 rocks a day to keep his arm loose but the rocks were not very effective in replicating a javelin or discus. Plus, he weighed 295 pounds when he reported in January but was down to 249 by mid-summer.

The days in Iraq were never predictable for Bildstein. Some days he spent just waiting on a bridge counting cars for intelligence purposes. Other days he was engaged in 13-hour firefights with the enemy. And still other days, he would escort around generals and military VIPs.

"Once, we had to respond to an ambush," he said about one day's mission. "We rolled in there and the firefight had just ceased because we saw just the last minute or two of it and it was a complete mess. This platoon got hit pretty hard and there was stuff everywhere. We jumped out of our vehicles and helped the guys who needed help because that's just what you do. You suck it up and help each other out."

According to Bildstein, there is no time to think when you are caught in a firefight. One afternoon, he was cleaning his M-16 assault rifle after a sandstorm and suddenly his vehicle was being peppered with bullets.

"I remember thinking, `Who would be lighting firecrackers in the middle of Iraq?' and then I realized it was bullets popping over my head," said Bildstein. "I was sitting on the passenger side of the vehicle and I saw dust kick up next to me. Then three rounds hit the side of my vehicle so I threw my weapon back together and ran around to the front of the vehicle.

"You don't even really think about it. Marines are taught to run to gunfire. That's what we do. Wherever the gunfire is coming from, that's where we go to destroy it. There are no questions about it.

"So when I got to the front of the vehicle, I saw a flash come out of a train car because they had launched an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) and it exploded right next to us. We started shooting back and when you're shooting, you kind of zone out. It's just a trigger that you unlock to fire and you pull. You just let it go without even thinking about it.

"The firefights didn't scare us because we had these big vests and these kevlars on that stop bullets. And bullets couldn't penetrate our vehicles so we had this stupid confidence. Fearless and blind is what they call us."

On Sept. 16, 2005, Bildstein's platoon finished its mission at the Al Hadithah dam and two weeks later, he left Iraq for Kuwait. From Kuwait, his unit flew to North Carolina and spent eight days there "decompressing," as Bildstein described it. Then they were ready for their welcome home party in Akron, where Bildstein's family met him and drove him home to North Olmsted.

After two weeks at home, Bildstein got in his car and drove to Athens to see his coaches and teammates. He began to practice his throws again but he soon underwent surgery to remove the torn cartilage from his knee caused by the landmine. Six weeks of recovery followed and just three weeks ago, Bildstein was cleared to begin practicing again.

"They say some people are different when they get back from a war zone but Eric is the same jovial person he was when he left," said Bobcat head track and field coach Clay Calkins. "He has a positive attitude about everything and is charismatic, funny, a hard-worker and a team leader. He's been a great role model for our other kids to look up to."

With his weight up to 270 pounds, Bildstein's strength is improving each day but he knows he has a long way to go to get back to the throwing shape he was in before he left for Iraq. He is hoping to redshirt these indoor and outdoor track seasons but that depends on whether the NCAA will grant him a rare sixth year of eligibility. Bildstein already redshirted his freshman year after missing the entire fall quarter while in basic training.

"There's definitely some atrophy there," Bildstein said about the muscles in his body. "I'm not as strong as I used to be. I'm still trying to get back up to speed but my footwork is definitely slower and I can feel it. It's like my mind is telling my body to do something but it's not responding at the same speed that it used to.

"I've just got to work at it and it's going to take some time. I just want to have a fair shot to get back to where I left off."

In his first taste of competition since returning from Iraq, Bildstein threw at the Marietta Open on Jan. 21. Since he hopes to redshirt, he competed unattached - meaning he didn't affect Ohio's team score - and won the 35-pound weight throw with a toss of 53 feet, 11.25 inches, which was more than a foot longer than the runner-up but almost four feet shorter than his school record throw of 57-10.5 from the 2004 indoor season.

Bildstein now lives in a rental house atop a hill in Athens with three other students. He has his own bedroom and walks to all of his classes but civilian life is not quite normal for him yet.

"Our house has heat and food in the fridge so it's nice," he said, "but I'm having trouble sleeping at night because I'm so used to being around other people all the time. I was stuck sharing a room with others for 10 months so now I just lay there and it's weird not hearing someone else breathe or snore or talk.

"While I'm out during the day, sounds still make me jumpy. The other day, someone thumped a microphone a couple of times and I thought, `Oh man, we're about to get mortared.' Also, a car back-fired three times and I was like, `Who's shooting? Wait a second, there's nobody shooting here.'

"And when I'm walking around at night, I pay attention to people walking up behind me and I need to know how far away they are. I also catch myself remembering where things are at and looking for things that weren't there the day before. I have to tell myself, `Dude, you're at home and it doesn't matter.' I just got so used to doing those things that it's tough to break."

Now, Bildstein must wait to hear back from the NCAA regarding his final year of eligibility. If the sixth year is granted, he has high hopes for his return to competition next year. If not, he will begin competing for the Bobcats right away and hope that his skills and strength make a rapid recovery. Either way, he knows he will be okay because there are much more important things in life to worry about. He learned that lesson first-hand while trying to help rebuild the hopes and dreams of a foreign country.

"When they flew us out," Bildstein recalled about his last days in Iraq, "the back of the helicopter was open and I remember looking out and seeing the Euphrates River and the dam and thinking, `Wow, I cannot believe this is happening.' It's so much a part of your life by that point that you don't know anything else. Pretty soon, though, everything disappeared and there was nothing but desert behind me."

This story was written by Bob Lee, web coordinator for Ohio Athletics. If you have feature story ideas or if you are interested in contributing a story to ohiobobcats.com, please email him at leer1@ohio.edu.